The provisions room off the east hangar kept the cool of stone no matter the turn, and Yamaneko moved through it without hurry and without a single wasted step. He set the things they would carry on the bench in the order he would want them. Water and field rations asked nothing of you. A small case of remedies that he hoped to bring home as full as it left. He did not pack for the task. He packed for the long quiet on either side of it, and for the unexpected.

Yuki leaned against the doorframe, arms folded, boots crossed at the ankle, watching him pack. She spied the old bottle on the shelf above the bench. Stepping in, she pawed it down off its place before he could decide whether it was coming.

"This one," she said, turning it to the lamp so the dark of it caught the light. "You've had this one since before I could reach the shelf. I have watched you not drink this bottle for a dozen ages." She set it down in front of him like a risky card to play. "It's going to outlive the both of us. Somewhere there's an Usagijin vintner weeping that the finest thing his line ever made is being held hostage by a brooding Nekojin who drinks water."

"It keeps," Yamaneko said.

"It keeps." She said it back to him flat, marveling at the uselessness of it. "It keeps for what, Yama. There is no turn coming that is better than a turn you are alive to open it. That's the problem with this bottle. You're saving the good thing for a version of yourself that's just going to keep saving it." She picked it up again. "Pour me one and I'll prove a point."

"Proving you can empty a glass is a point no one in this palace would dispute," Yama remarked, reaching for the vintage. She feigned a little motion to tuck it away, then relinquished it with an exaggerated pout.

He took the bottle out of her hand, not quickly, and set it back on the shelf where it had stood, reaching behind it for the water flask. Filled it, and capped it. The small business of his hands was a complete answer and his quiet routine reflected the same question the bottle was asking.

Yuki knew that question best of all, which was exactly why she was allowed to be the one who poked at the edge of it. It was a bond he shared with the Princess. The poking, to her, was the opposite of cruelty. The only way she had ever found to lay her hand on a grief that did not belong to her and would not be waved away. An old wound that would never, in all the ages left to either of them, be set down. You could not comfort Yamaneko. He would not permit it. This was the one duty he held over himself and let nothing relieve. But she could needle him. She could make the old wound the butt of a small warm joke in a storeroom, and he would take it. Yuki felt she was chipping away at the grief, while Yamaneko used it to seal his resolve.

She turned to him and laid her hand on his arm, just above the wrist, and the joke went out of her face and left only the soothing that the joke had been carrying the whole time.

He looked at her hand, and then at her. The line he made with his mouth was not quite a smile and still unmistakably one. It was for her.

"Come on, old man," she said, soft. "Let's go get your scholar."

He caught her eye before they went, and held it until he was sure she had it. "It would be best if I spoke first. They will be startled at our arrival — and your diplomacy is still…" the pause was its own small needle, handed back to her "…evolving."

She gave him a look that promised nothing, which was the most honest answer she had.

The air split for the fraction of a beat that it took, and pushed them through to the other side.

Feelon's ship met them with the wrong silence.

It was a fine vessel. Usagizoku make of refined quality. A banking House's idea of comfort, opulent and serene in a warren-like personal vessel. It should have hummed with the daily business of staff and crew.

The sudden arrival of a Rip is always a startling thing to those who host the destination. The expected alarm became their own when their senses caught up with the reality in front of them. There was no steward asking their pardon before they had finished arriving.

Instead, along the plush, woven runner that carried the feet of inquisitive scholars the length of the cabin, two of Feelon's security disassembled in a sea of blood where they had been left.

The hand that had brought their demise belonged to a Lycan adorned in a sickly mauve hued armor, broad through the shoulder, a thing built to end discussions. His disheveled ebony mane carrying the claret of his inquisition. He had a pair of sai, one planted in an uncooperative steward and the other firm in his hand. A terrified Usagijin steward hung in his grip, held up to be spoken to.

He had been careful to tear his way through the ship. A Weapon that could open a sealed cabin could open the hull behind it, and a vessel such as this is a dense tangle of wire and conduit in its structure. A single errant stroke could kill everyone breathing inside it. A man who knew what the void did to a room did not draw steel on a ship he meant to walk out of. So he had done it the old way, with his hands, and the runner showed what the old way cost.

"I have all the time in the world, and you have—"

The air tore behind him.

His head turned to his shoulder, gaze cast sharply over it, instant. There was no mistaking that sound for one of the few in all creation who could make it, and no mistaking what it meant. No ally would be coming here. He ran the steward through with the sai and let the body fall, the prize gone worthless the tic a challenge arrived at his back. He turned to confront the two that had just ripped the dimensions to interfere.

Yama's one word set the tone for the beats to come. "Duuk!"

He knew the weapon in the general's hand for what it was — Conquest, one of the four pillars of inevitability, the tetrad of legend that no one living had ever counted in one place. Their resting places were a deeper mystery still. They had been rare until this rogue officer stumbled upon this one.

The sound of a dimension Weapon being summoned filled the cabin and sparked motion in Yuki. She lunged forward in haste, Jinsei's green glow radiating along the empty shelves, the blade restraining its full length to accommodate the risks the Lycan, Duuk, was also avoiding.

She had never in her life waited to be told where to swing her sword, and she was good. A rival for those thrice her ages. And, as always with Yuki, it was not her skill that would fail her. Her impatience cost her again. So eager to eliminate the morbid executioner, she slipped from her awareness of the fight and also on one of the many scrolls and books that littered the deck. The false gravity of the deck landed her in an uncomfortable collision with the bare shelves and her pride.

Duuk did not waste it. A captive Princess was worth a great deal more than a dead one, or a frightened Usagijin. He was quick enough to know it in the instant and quicker still to know he need not win the room to have her, only to take her and rip away. He stepped into her ruined balance and brought the hilt of his weapon around and pommeled her behind the ear, delaying her recovery further. Not out of the fight for long, but long enough to steal away with her. A prize far greater than anything the scholar could give him.

Yamaneko struck at that very moment.

He did not arrive the way she had, all line and intention. A swift exchange of swings, parries and ripostes drew a series of flashes and sounds. There was no single blow to point to afterward and call the one that mattered, just a sudden economy of motion in the space Duuk occupied. Close and constant and giving him nothing to set against, the swing cut deep, if you could call it a cut. It was a gouge, a canyon in the flesh of Duuk's chest that reached across his arm, releasing his grip on the sai in that hand. The dull clattering of it striking the blood-soaked runner was doubly muffled. Once by the carpet. Then again by Duuk reacting vocally to being struck.

The cold DarkPack general could not contain his discomfort. The man who had grumbled at his foul luck a breath ago now howled. Yamaneko's Mujo did not wound the way a blade wounds. The dual rippled blades unmade what it passed through, and flesh that has been unmade is not cut, it is simply, raggedly, no longer there.

Duuk gave ground. He was a general, who did not lose, but now his only remaining prize, out of reach in the same breath that opened his chest. He weighed it fast and without feeling. Yamaneko and Mujo full in the fight and on the attack, his Conquest split in two and unreachable, nothing in his grasp that he came for, a golden opportunity lost. He could not have seen this coming, now bitter with defeat. He came for prey, and he would leave with a debt to be repaid and a Weapon to recover. Rex would demand a reckoning.

Leaving with less than nothing, half a Weapon in hand. Duuk spat at the Nekozoku, set the dimension open, and slipped away.

What he left behind lay inert on the stained carpet where it had fallen. The other half of his symbiotic Conquest. Now lifeless in no hand at all, part of his own self. Abandoned as a prisoner.

Yuki slowly came to her feet. Dazed and still regaining her focus. With so many directions to aim her frustration, she spat half curses toward all of them. A hand soothing the red mark on the side of her head, the other a flat palm pushing up off one of the ruined books she would never forgive.

Yamaneko crossed to her and reached his hand down, open. She took it and let him bring her to her feet. He did not say you missed your footing, because the floor had said it, and there was no use waking a person who was fully alert.

What he did say was, "You want a drink?"

It startled the curse off her tongue. It was so exactly wrong, and so exactly theirs, the joke turned around and handed back to her over a body-strewn floor by the one man in the galaxy who would never take that drink himself. It broke the fury as only the right foolishness can, all at once, into something that was nearly a laugh and was at least no longer rage.

"Yeah," she said, unsteady, rubbing the side of her head. "Yeah, when this is done, I am due several." Taking a look around the cabin as her balance returned her gaze fixed at the front end of the room. "Let's get the door." Yuki motioned her hand toward the far end of the cabin. "Probably some in there." As she became more aware of those who would not be getting up, the slight grin left her face entirely.

Yamaneko bent and lifted the inert half of the ugly weapon that called itself Conquest from the blood-soaked runner. The prisoner left behind. "A hostage Duuk most certainly will seek to be reunited with. We will see him again, likely soon," Yamaneko said, as a matter of fact, to Yuki. It was a dim thing in his hand, and he knew it for one. He examined it and found it only metal, because a Weapon in a hand that is not its wielder's has no life in it at all. The essence that made it Conquest had Ripped away wearing a chest wound. He did not hold it like a prize. Not a blade, just a tool the enemy wanted back, and would not be having. He tucked the inert half-weapon in his belt, and faced the sealed passage, and raised his voice to it, even and carrying. "Ren, open the door."

"Ren."

Yuki crossed and knocked, twice, flat of her fist against the ceramic — a sound, a human sound, the sound of someone on the friendly side of a wall.

For a long moment the ship gave them nothing. Then, beyond the door, the faint murmur of whispers — two voices, low and quick, deciding.

Yuki knocked again, harder.

"Ren, it's Yuki."

The intercom clicked to life with a very small voice: "Is… is he gone?"

"This is Yama. Yes, Ren, you are safe." The door slid back on Ren and Feelon both, who had been pressed into the far corner of the cabin. Scant protection for the scholar and the banker. Folded together in the back of a room they had sealed against the horror of their own people dying. For one whole breath their faces were nothing but relief.

It lasted until they remembered who sent that relief. A Queen who was seeking an answer.

Yuki watched the warmth drain and a second fear come up under it, reluctant and complicated. The first fear had been simple and this one was not. Duuk was a clean terror; you ran from Duuk or you died. But the two in the doorway were more the crown's own hand. They were the crown's claws. Byakko did not send her will across a galaxy, to a fugitive's ship, for salutations. The Usagijin had been saved by fortune. Arriving shortly after Duuk was worth paying homage to the fates. They both understood, in the same sinking instant, that being saved and being fetched were not, this turn, two different things.

Nobody said it. There was nothing to say that would have made it smaller.

Yuki and Yamaneko faced a somewhat different situation than they were expecting. The terror that forced these two men into retreat reshaped this mission into something unfamiliar. They entered the room as Ren and Feelon rose to meet them. They had been sent to retrieve answers, and Ren, if needed. What they arrived at was a slaughter and far more questions.

Ren's hands found the habits of the small things that frightened hands find. There was a service set on the cabin's reading table, and he reached for it. The residual fear would not leave him. As he tried to pour himself something from the decanter, his hand shook so badly that the rim chattered against the glass. The dark wine went more onto the platter than into the fluted glass.

Yuki had regained her youthful step and crossed the cabin to steady Ren's hand.

She did it without thinking and without a word, her fingers lay over his and brought the decanter level until the pour was clean. The same girl who let her impatience get the better of her showed loving patience with the old scholar. The strike and the steadying are the same motion learned from opposite ends, and somewhere in the last beat she accepted the far end of it.

"Hakase," she said, low, the title gentling the rest. "We're no threat to you. Be at ease." She let go of his hand only when it would hold itself. "My sister is worried about you. And — Hakase, this really does not look good."

My sister. Those words resonated into the small room and changed the pressure of it. Not a warrant from a faceless office. Nor the cold machinery of authority grinding toward him in the dark. Byakko, who had sat next to him the evening before and let him talk himself out of his own dread, was worried. It was the kindest thing anyone had said to him in three ages. In the same breath, the whole weight of the throne was presenting itself quietly. He heard both halves of it. This was the way of things since his work began to reveal answers.

Yamaneko had not moved from the doorway. He looked at his old friend with a plain face, still processing the dread that filled his old teacher.

"In all the ages we have known each other, Ren," he said without anger, only a hurt worn very smooth, "was there nothing you could say to me?" He let that sit. "What have you gotten yourself into?" And softer, the part that set the errand aside and picked up the older bond instead: "What is this about, old friend?"

Ren's composure, what was left of it, went. Not into weeping, but under the weeping. The loosening of a man who has been holding a great weight quietly so long that no one he loved could help him carry it. A man who has had a revelation that the weight hurt.

"There was nothing I could say," he managed, "that would not have put you where I am." He looked at the steady glass in his hand and did not drink from it either, which neither of them remarked. "That was the only kindness I had left to give anyone. I have spent it badly, it seems."

"Tell us the start of it," Yamaneko said. "Not the end. I'm not asking you for the end." Moving to stand near his old teacher, Yamaneko poured his own glass that he would never sip from. "What lit this fire?"

"It was ordinary," he said, as though that were the most monstrous part, and perhaps to him it was. "A commission. A reasonable one. The compensation was fair, generous even, but not so generous I would think to look at it twice. A client wished a thing translated, and translation is my work, so I did my work." He turned the untouched glass a slow quarter. "It came as a data crystal. Pre-ancient. Those are the oldest things we hold, you understand, we have only ever opened a handful. The rest are simply shut to us, a trillion ages of silence we can hold in the hand and never read. Except this one." His ears, low to begin with, went lower. "This one was not weathered. The oldest object any of us had ever touched, and it looked as though it had been made the turn before last. I told myself there were explanations. I am very good at telling myself there are explanations."

"You ran it," Yamaneko said.

"I ran it. And the algorithm — Yama, the match. Ninety-four. Ninety-four against a grammar we had been begging for fragments of for my entire life, and here it gave itself up nearly whole. I should have been frightened of it then. Instead I was delighted." The self-disgust in it was very quiet and very total. "I confirmed there were no large untranslated fragments, packaged the result, and turned it over to the client. That is all. That is the entire of what I did. I never read it."

"You never read it?" Yuki asked with surprise, and the curious youth in her was not a doubt. It was the cold understanding arriving. He was hunted for a thing he did not even carry in his own head.

"There was no need to read it. The client did not pay me to read it; they paid me to render it. I checked it for completeness, not for sense." He spread one trembling hand. "I am being pulled from my den over a document I could not tell you the first line of."

Feelon spoke for the first time, from the corner, and what he said was not to them but to Ren, and it had the sound of a thing already worked through alone in a dark room and only now said aloud.

"The translation itself was nothing," the commissioner said. "I read the summary, Ren showed me the summary, when it all began to — when the letters stopped. It said nothing. Shopkeeping. Inventories, allotments, the schematics of perfectly ordinary things, things any foundry in the nine capitals makes by the gross. There was nothing in the words worth a single drop of blood spilled here this turn." He looked, despite himself, toward where the floor was. "Which is what frightens me past all sense. Who sends a monster to slaughter for an inventory?" The rest of the room had his attention while he reasoned this out loud. "Because it makes sense to someone, and it is not a fool, and it did not come this far for a parts list."

The cabin held that. The danger was not in the document. The document was a parts list. And a general of the DarkPack had killed his way across a banking House's vessel for the man who had handled it.

It was Yuki, in the end, who asked the question that turned the whole of it.

"All right," she said. "This is how I see it. There's a parts list nobody would cross a room for, and Duuk crossed the galaxy for the man who typed it up." She looked between the scholar and the banker. "So what's the part you're not telling us. What was in there that's worth your life — because it isn't the words, you both just said it isn't the words."

And Feelon's face did a thing, a small terrible arithmetic, the exact look of a banker who has just seen a column come out wrong in a way that means more than money. He turned to Ren, and his voice when it came was almost pleading.

"By the bells of the Warren, Ren, tell me you kept no copy!"

Ren looked at him, and did not understand, and the not-understanding was its own answer.

"Of course I kept a copy," he said. "The Library keeps a copy. It is in the fee, Feelon — every commission, the original goes to the client and a record stays with the Library, that has been the arrangement since before either of us drew breath. It is not even a decision. It is procedure. I keep one of everything I have ever rendered." He read their faces, one to the next, and the last of his color went. "I do it with all the ancient data. I have always done it with all the ancient data. It is the most ordinary thing in my—"

"Where," Yamaneko said.

"Not here." Ren's hand closed over the glass he would not drink. "I am not a fool in every particular. I do not carry it. It is somewhere no one would think to look, and it is safe where it is. That much I have managed."

And there it was, laid in the middle of the cabin among the spilled wine and the spilled blood. Ren was not a man being hunted to be silenced, but a man being hunted to be opened. Because somewhere, in a place only Ren knew, sat the one copy of information a creature like Duuk would empty a ship to own. And the client who thought they held the only key had just been proven wrong by the most ordinary habit in the scholar's trade.

Yamaneko looked at his old friend for a long moment. He did not ask where the copy was. Not now, not with three of Feelon's people cooling on the floor and a general nursing a chest wound somewhere out in the dark already deciding when to come back.

"You'll tell the Queen," he said. "Not me. Not here. You'll tell Byakko, all of it, the part you've told us and the part you haven't and the part you don't yet know you know. She'll hear it whole, and she'll know what to do with it, which is more than either of us can say standing in it." He held out his hand. "Come home, Ren. You've carried this far enough alone to prove whatever you were trying to prove. Let it down now."

Ren looked at the offered hand for a long time. Then he set the untouched glass on the shelf, very precisely, the way a careful man leaves a room he does not expect to see again, and he took it.

Feelon did not move from his corner, and when Yuki turned to him he was already shaking his head, gently, a banker declining a transaction.

"My ship," he said. "My crew. My dead. I'll not have it said a House man ran twice." But it was not only the pride, and the steadiness in him now came from somewhere other than nerve — it came from the column finally adding up. "And there is the simpler arithmetic. With Ren gone, and that —" he nodded at the dead half-Weapon at Yamaneko's belt "— gone with him, there is nothing on this vessel any creature in the dark would cross the room for. I am worth less than the fuel in her, the moment you leave. The safest place in the galaxy for a frightened banker, Commander, is a ship that no longer holds a single thing worth taking." A thin attempt at his old wine-warm manner, badly frayed. "I shall sit here with my dead and be gloriously, unprofitably safe. Go. Take him to your Queen."

Yuki looked around the ruin of the cabin, realizing Feelon was alone now. "Feelon, call for an escort. Yama and I will wait until they rendezvous and escort you to safer space." Yama spoke up firmly, "Agreed. And we will give these brave fallen some due honors. Restoring order here will ease the passage, somewhat." Yuki nodded and Feelon showed them where to find the supplies they needed for such a thing. A few chords had passed when a transmission from a peace keeping authority made contact. Feelon bowed graciously toward his guests. "You have my deepest respects, Nekojin. Your assistance this turn was timely and beyond fortunate. Our lives were spared by your intervention."

There was a look, then, between the scholar and the banker — the two who had run together, sealed the door together, listened to the same killing through the same wall. Neither of them made it into words. Ren inclined his silver head, low, the bow of a man to the friend who had spent a career to buy him a single arc of road, and Feelon returned it, and that was the whole of the goodbye, and it was enough.

Yamaneko set his hand on Ren's shoulder and Ren stepped in close for the crossing. The sai went with them, and the witness went with them. Everything in the long quiet ship that Duuk might have wanted left in the same rip of space.

The energy seized them from behind and hauled them inward, and they were gone, the three of them, home toward the palace and the Queen who was worried. Leaving behind them the Usagizoku vessel to dock with the peace keeper skiff for his escort home. Lit and empty of chaos. Carrying nothing now but a banker and his grief and his people who would not be hosting for any ship again.